Writing Weimar

The years of the Weimar Republic saw complex cultural change in Germany as well as political turmoil. Writing Weimar draws on the large amount of research done on the period since the 1980s in order to show how literary writers developed critical perspectives on the social and political issues of the time, and how those perspectives were related to longer-term developments in German culture which run beyond the watershed events of 1918 and 1933. Individual chapters discuss the dominant trends in the poetry, the theatre, and the novel, as well as the literary representation of the city, of technology, and of the First World War. The book also sheds new light on one of the abiding mysteries of German culture in the 1920s: precisely what were the implications of the term Neue Sachlichkeit as it came to be applied to the cultural trends of the time?

In Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin, Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, Caplan offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and a new understanding of the political resonances that result from it. Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin reveals how Yiddish literature participated in the culture of Weimar-era modernism, how active Yiddish writers were in the literary scene, and how German-speaking Jews read descriptions of Yiddish-speaking Jews to uncover the emotional complexity of what they managed to create even in the midst of their confusion and ambivalence in Germany. Caplan's masterful narrative affords new insights into literary form, Jewish culture, and the philosophical and psychological motivations for aesthetic modernism.

In spite of having been short-lived, "Weimar" has never lost its fascination. Until recently the Weimar Republic's place in German history was primarily defined by its catastrophic beginning and end - Germany's defeat in 1918 and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933; its history seen mainly in terms of politics and as an arena of flawed decisions and failed compromises. However, a flourishing of interdisciplinary scholarship on Weimar political culture is uncovering arenas of conflict and change that had not been studied closely before, such as gender, body politics, masculinity, citizenship, empire and borderlands, visual culture, popular culture and consumption. This collection offers new perspectives from leading scholars in the disciplines of history, art history, film studies, and German studies on the vibrant political culture of Germany in the 1920s. From the traumatic ruptures of defeat, revolution, and collapse of the Kaiser's state, the visionaries of Weimar went on to invent a republic, calling forth new citizens and cultural innovations that shaped the republic far beyond the realms of parliaments and political parties. Kathleen Canning is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History, Women's Studies, and German at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850-1914 (2nd ed., University of Michigan Press 2002) and Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship (Cornell University Press 2006). She is currently a board member of Central European History and the Journal of Modern History. Kerstin Barndt is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Sentiment und Sachlichkeit. Der Roman der Neuen Frau in der Weimarer Republik (Böhlau 2004) and several articles on German modernism, gender theory, and the history of reading. Her current book project Exhibition Time. History, Memory, and Aesthetics in Germany focuses on contemporary exhibition culture against the backdrop of national unifi cation, migration, and deindustrialization. Kristin McGuire is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan and co-Director of the Global Feminisms Project based at the University of Michigan. She is the co-author of Global Feminisms through a Virtual Archive (SIGNS 2010). She is currently working on a book manuscript, Activism, Intimacy and Selfhood which offers a comparative historical analysis of women activists in Germany and Poland from 1890-1918; and co-editing a volume of translated essays entitled Women on Nietzsche, Gender, and Sexuality: An Anthology of European Women's Writings, 1880-1920. Cover image: Marianne Brandt, Es wird marschiert (1928)

A laboratory for competing visions of modernity, the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) continues to haunt the imagination of the twentieth century. Its political and cultural lessons retain uncanny relevance for all who seek to understand the tensions and possibilities of our age. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook represents the most comprehensive documentation of Weimar culture, history, and politics assembled in any language. It invites a wide community of readers to discover the richness and complexity of the turbulent years in Germany before Hitler's rise to power. Drawing from such primary sources as magazines, newspapers, manifestoes, and official documents (many unknown even to specialists and most never before available in English), this book challenges the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, and social life. Its thirty chapters explore Germany's complex relationship to democracy, ideologies of "reactionary modernism," the rise of the "New Woman," Bauhaus architecture, the impact of mass media, the literary life, the tradition of cabaret and urban entertainment, and the situation of Jews, intellectuals, and workers before and during the emergence of fascism. While devoting much attention to the Republic's varied artistic and intellectual achievements (the Frankfurt School, political theater, twelve-tone music, cultural criticism, photomontage, and urban planning), the book is unique for its inclusion of many lesser-known materials on popular culture, consumerism, body culture, drugs, criminality, and sexuality; it also contains a timetable of major political events, an extensive bibliography, and capsule biographies. This will be a major resource and reference work for students and scholars in history; art; architecture; literature; social and political thought; and cultural, film, German, and women's studies.

In the Weimar Republic, popular culture was the scene of heated controversies that tested the limits of national cohesion. How could marginal figures like a stigmatized villager, a grub street writer, or an advocate for nudism become flashpoints of political conflict? Peter S. Fisher draws on Siegfried Kracauer's trenchant observations on Weimar's contradictions to knit these exemplary stories together. Following his methodology, society's underdogs take center stage, pushing the headline makers into the background.

"Berlin emerged from the First World War as a multicultural European capital of immigration from the former Russian Empire, and while many Russian emigres moved to France and other countries in the 1920s, a thriving east European Jewish community remained. Yiddish-speaking intellectuals and activists participated vigorously in German cultural and political debate. Multilingual Jewish journalists, writers, actors and artists, invigorated by the creative atmosphere of the city, formed an environment which facilitated exchange between the main centres of Yiddish culture: eastern Europe, North America and Soviet Russia. All this came to an end with the Nazi rise to power in 1933, but Berlin remained a vital presence in Jewish cultural memory, as is testified by the works of Sholem Asch, Israel Joshua Singer, Zalman Shneour, Moyshe Kulbak, Uri Zvi Grinberg and Meir Wiener. This volume includes contributions by an international team of leading scholars dealing with various aspects of history, arts and literature, which tell the dramatic story of Yiddish cultural life in Weimar Berlin as a case study in the modern European culture."

First published in 2001. This is the first substantial reference work in English on the various forms that constitute "life writing." As this term suggests, the Encyclopedia explores not only autobiography and biography proper, but also letters, diaries, memoirs, family histories, case histories, and other ways in which individual lives have been recorded and structured. It includes entries on genres and subgenres, national and regional traditions from around the world, and important auto-biographical writers, as well as articles on related areas such as oral history, anthropology, testimonies, and the representation of life stories in non-verbal art forms.

The Collected Writings of Franz Liszt: Dramaturgical Leaves: Richard Wagner completes the second half of Liszt’s writings about stage works, its composers, and music drama. In this volume, Liszt focuses on the works of his most controversial devotee and son-in-law, Richard Wagner, whose music dramas Liszt championed as conductor during his tenure in Weimar. Here, we see Liszt prove his skill and expertise as a music critic, as well. He offers a critical analysis of the aesthetic and musical principles that underlie Wagner’s operas, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and The Flying Dutchman, including a thorough discussion of Wagner’s Leitmotif system of composition. Additionally, his findings are substantiated with a plethora of music examples, which will satisfy those who wanted greater musical substance from his writings. He also foretells the magnitude of Wagner’s influence on prosperity in his pamphlet-length essay, The Rhine’s Gold. Finally, the editor and translator of this volume, Janita Hall-Swadley, provides a unique perspective on these same principles, which is based on Wagner’s own mysterious diagram of “The Philosopher’s Stone,” which was supposed to be included in the original 1863 edition of the composer’s important writing, Opera and Drama, but never made it to publication.